Softmod Questions

Hi all,

I have been working on the softmod for all wii's guide, posted by dogeggs, for my LU64, with menu 3.4U, and have a couple of questions.

1) The second step when doing the nand backup - I go through the process, and notice that there are ECC failures (uncorrectable). Then, when it goes to verify the backup, there is a verify failure on 3 blocks.

2) When I try to update to system menu 4.1U from the updater in the wii homebrew channel, it goes through the process just fine with all succeddful downloads. However, once it gets to the part where it shows that it's installing title for the System Menu 4.1, I get: ERROR! (ret = -1036).

This is completely normal; in order to bring down the price of NAND flash chips, all manufacturers will allow chips to leave the factory with a small number of bad blocks. It's similar to bad pixels in LCD panels -- it would be too expensive to throw away the whole panel (or in this case, the whole chip) due to a few bad pixels. With NAND flash, software usually remaps these blocks so you don't even notice, but BootMii works at the lowest level possible so we have to take these into consideration when writing our code. There are 4096 blocks; according to the flash chip manufacturer, at least 4016 blocks are valid (in other words, up to 80 blocks may be bad).